Shipboard antennas often use HF frequencies that require the entire ship to act as an antenna. For particular HF frequencies, heretofore, it has not been possible to achieve any reasonable transmit efficiencies. This requires enormous transmit power and results in other problems such as interference with collocated receivers. Interference mechanisms take various forms such as crossmodulation, broadband noise radiation, desensitization, intermodulation, and spurious emissions. A device that addresses many of these is the comb linear amplifier combiner (CLAC). CLAC's technique of putting the high-power amplifiers (HPAs) close to the antenna enables the use of lossy narrowband high Q filters that cleans up adjacent channel interference. Thus collocated radios can tune closer in frequency, making more efficient use of the spectrum. Yet even more efficiency is achievable with the present invention. The present invention enhances the capabilities of CLAC by attacking issues not previously or adequately addressed by CLAC. In ship environments with multiple transmit and receive frequency ranges and/or antennas, these systems have not met satisfactory performance for high speed communications.
High Temperature Superconducting (HTS) material is comprised of an alloy of various exotic materials. They can reach zero resistance but the exotic materials are power limited, resulting in HTS quenching and/or the generating of inter-modulation products, which can defeat the main purpose of CLAC. At high power levels air core, pure copper wire inductors do not have either of those problems. Cooling more conventional components such as copper coils can achieve improved performance, e.g., higher Q and lower insertion loss leading to steeper rolloff, consequently more channels with low insertion loss and much lower in-channel insertion losses.